Of what possible value to us is the “graphosphere,” a category whose gamut ranges across four centuries and comprises such incompatible objects as consecrated antimensia and triumphal arches? Some might bristle at learning yet another inscrutable word, having weathered other spatial concepts such as Michel Foucault’s “heterotopia,” Arjun Appadurai’s “mediascape,” or (most compatibly) Iurii Lotman’s “semiosphere.”Footnote 1 This Slavic Review critical forum offers a rewarding response to that question. Seldom do we have an opportunity to stitch together our scattered knowledge in such a deeply coherent fashion. As you read these short essays, you will sense their effects. In this brief comment, I identify four ways in which “graphosphere” enables us to think broadly about our public environment across centuries, including beyond the present moment.
The Graphoshere as Scale
The term’s first contribution concerns spatial and temporal magnitude. The graphosphere enables us to re-examine diverse artifacts across unusually broad expanses of time. Franklin focuses on four centuries that could be seen as a long early modernity (1450 to 1850), but its resonances extend both back to the medieval period and forward to the present day. Here is an example of its continuing relevance: one of the best-known sculptures in contemporary art—a “visible word” in our modern, urban graphosphere—is Robert Indiana’s LOVE in its many proliferations (thirty-five in the US alone; eighty-six across the world).Footnote 2
LOVE is, perhaps, a crude example, but it unequivocally participates in the graphosphere’s space of the visible word. As for scale, the near-unbridgeable conceptual distance between the LOVE sculpture and the (often pre-modern) objects in the essays here is matched by the near-unbridgeable geographic distance between Indianapolis and the Slavic world—as well as by the temporal distance from the modern artist’s 1970 to (for example) the 1586 Tsar Cannon (with its own loving inscriptionFootnote 3 ). The capacity of the graphosphere to work across these distances of object, space, and time—for those of us who are contrarians by nature—points to its value as an investigative concept, extending beyond Franklin’s volume, beyond the essays collected here, and forward to our own potential work.
As the space of the visible word, the graphosphere is as important for its physical presence as for its semantic legibility or coherence. On a spectrum from “information” to “decoration,” the artifacts of the graphosphere resist stable commitment, often drifting more towards “font” than “semiosis.” As Simon Franklin contends, its inscriptions may comprise languages inaccessible even to the literate reader.Footnote 4 Its performance may be oddly tolerant of contradiction precisely because its concern is often self-display (and, only secondarily, meaning). The graphosphere understands inscription as a kind of perpetual self-audition (“am I appropriately visible?”). In its attention to phatic discourse, we can see a recurrent drive to occupy space, lest that space be supplanted by other writing (hence, its potential for dissidence, for a breakdown in social control). Displayed across the surface of bells, signs, coins, or grave slabs, the graphosphere’s words may be indifferent to their own superficiality: they may strive for neither depth nor interiority. They are not so much demonstrative of wisdom as appropriative of space, whether that appropriation be Simon Ushakov’s signature on the lower bevel of an icon (his 1658 Kazan Mother of God) or the declarative 1681 engraving on the Kremlin’s noisome bell, subsequently exiled by the ailing Fedor III (1676–82) to the distant Nikolo-Korelskii monastery near Arkhangelsk.Footnote 5 The scale of ambition for the public space of written words is, in this sense, the emergent empire’s fever dream.Footnote 6
The Graphosphere as Detector of Commonalities
A second strength that the graphoshere brings to mediate our distantly positioned fields is the chance to perceive with new eyes potential commonalities, differences, coincidences, and anomalies. Un-inscribed public space is a volatile expanse, potentially bringing into visibility objects that might be dangerous by their very incongruity. At any moment the empty space may be appropriated by the visible word for deviance: by a protest sign, by a petition, by graffiti, or even by a so-called “blank paper protest,” such as a single sheet of paper held up at Russian public gatherings as dissent against the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.Footnote 7
The graphosphere thus makes clear to us the ways in which the public space as such is always potentially at risk, since any blank space displayed in public is available for capture: it is logistically simple, inexpensive, easy to organize, hard to prevent, and ontologically divisive, since its blankness stands in for the incipient right to demur. Small wonder the so-called “blank-paper protest” has a long history.Footnote 8
We might remember that conceptualist artist Dmitrii Prigov’s 1986 mock-public action to post and distribute his typed “Appeals of Dmitrii Aleksandrovich Prigov to Citizens”—which he affixed to light poles, trees, metro walls, apartment entryways, and telephone booths around Moscow’s Beliaevo district—culminated in his arrest and confinement to a psychiatric hospital.Footnote 9 He had papered the graphosphere with unauthorized public words; since they did not seem to be explicitly directed against the state, the only remaining explanation was mental illness. One might see a kindred inclination in the work of his friend Vladimir Sorokin: in his first novel Ocheredʹ (The Queue, 1985), Muscovites standing in line silently doze off, leaving several blank pages in the initial publication by Sintaksis, the Paris-based publishing house of Andrei Siniavskii and Mariia Rozanova.Footnote 10 In a conversation with this author, Sorokin noted how the publisher initially considered the blank pages to be defective (brak) and reprinted a new copy. Readers will appreciate the connection: both Prigov (with his taped-up slips of paper) and Sorokin (with his blank pages) were violating the protocols of their respective graphospheres. In each case, the deviating writer was considered defective: Prigov (by the Moscow authorities) for his slips of paper; Sorokin (by the exiled Soviet opposition) for his blank pages. For both, the graphosphere was the volatile space where this drama was staged.
A final, more distant moment: the Old Believer Avvakum, imprisoned in his Arctic Pustozersk and completing his autobiography, turns to the Elder Epifanii, his spiritual guide, to ask the latter’s forgiveness for having harbored a spy from state seizure. Leaving Epifanii a blank space in his own document, Avvakum entreats him, “see, I have left a space for you, and do you, with your own hand, write in either forgiveness or penance.” Obligingly, Epifanii writes, “God pardons thee.”Footnote 11 Much could be written about this moment; I will confine myself to this: in this rare deviation from what we believe to be the canon’s graphospheric orthodoxy, Avvakum leaves open an empty space for the visible word to be inscribed as the Elder’s judgment. This headstrong archpriest, every much a graphomaniac as Prigov also claims to have been, turns over the solemn space of writing to Epifanii in an act of faith and devotion.
For all their apparent dissimilarities, these four figures—Prigov (with his public entreaties), Sorokin (with his public somnambulants), the anti-war dissenters (with their blank public protests), and the pre-modern archpriest (exposing a blank space for Epifanii in his diary)—turn to the empty potentiality of the graphosphere, its risks and repressions, its opportunities and strategies. It is possible to see the unexpected (and imperfect) adjacencies of an unauthorized appeal taped to a light post; the “defective” pages where blankness signals the dozing unconscious; the protester’s invisible outcry; and the deviant archpriest’s blank space that appeals for absolution. All are sites that disclose the material potentialities of the graphosphere.
The Graphosphere as Convener
A third core feature of the graphosphere is its capacity to gather together unexpected sets of clamoring interlocutors. I will limit myself to two sets: the first, a cohort of scholars who emerge from western critical theory; the second, figures from the Soviet intellectual tradition. These two sets are not distinct, but rather entangled in ways that will surely cause confusion. Régis Debray, for example (from the first cohort), specifically writes about the “graphosphere,” but only as a fleeting transition from writing’s first appearance (the logosphere) through the graphosphere to today’s videosphere.Footnote 12
All the same, and before we move Debray offstage, the theorist’s taxonomy (“from the Gutenberg Revolution to the rise of TV”) inadvertently calls forth the very reason his model is not useful to us: only in 1615—one hundred and sixty years after the distant printing of the Gutenberg Bible (and only after several false starts in the Russian Empire by such figures as the Novgorod archbishop Gennadii, Maksim Grek, and Ivan Fedorov)—did a “continuous history of institutionalized printing” establish itself in Russia.Footnote 13 It took, moreover, another eight decades (until 1697) before Patriarch Adrian decreed that church service books must be printed.Footnote 14 Only in 1783 did Catherine II (1762–96) issue the decree “O volʹnykh tipografiiakh” (On free presses), which permitted private printing houses such as I.K. Schnor and N.I. Novikov to operate. Against the background of this Gutenbergian absence, or at least delay, the diverse approaches taken by the contributors here in their responses to Franklin’s graphosphere represent an alternative historiography. In that vein, they have the potential for re-thinking the shape of our field in its broadest outlines.
With his “semiosphere,” Iurii Lotman (from the second cohort) is also, in his own way, another flawed interlocutor. His work certainly bears a close kinship relation, as its suffix suggests, to Franklin’s term,Footnote 15 yet any claim to a genealogy (for example, Suess—Vernadskii—Lotman—Franklin) remains imperfect for this reason: unlike these forebears, Franklin wisely offers “a thing, not a theory.”Footnote 16 Against Lotman’s over-arching aim towards abstractions, Franklin offers concrete, material objects for analysis in an intentionally semi-systematic series of essays that explicitly resist any one master narrative. This understanding of the graphosphere leaves open a much broader community of potential interlocutors. As interlocutors rather than adherents, readers (and fellow scholars) will be rewarded by the startled sensation of seeing with new eyes an enormous range of both familiar and unfamiliar word-objects.
The Graphosphere as Institutional Shift
In 1987, Harvey Goldblatt wrote “in its first decade, SEEJ published only one article in the field of medieval Slavic literature.”Footnote 17 Compare this condition to today’s extraordinary multi-generation expertise in this forum alone.Footnote 18 One might point to other signs of progress: in 2026 three hundred fifty AATSEEL members chose “Medieval” as one of their research interests; at the 2025 ASEEES convention, eleven sessions focused on medieval topics.Footnote 19
Nevertheless, we cannot help but recognize a cause for worry: today, only a tiny handful of Slavic departments can still retain an east central European medievalist under retirement age; new positions are unlikely without also requiring the broadest imaginable geographic or historical expertise; the reasons for this do not need rehearsal.Footnote 20 Here is the paradox: the rarified field of east central European medieval studies has never been as accessible to the beginning PhD student as it is now, not only through today’s digital availability (including opportunities for remote instruction and hybrid learning), but also through such support opportunities as the Medieval Slavic Summer Institute at the Hilandar Research Library and elsewhere. Is this interest likely to translate into a new generation of tenured medievalists?
Medievalist “capacity building” (an odd combination of words) is a goal with which neither Title VI (now CAANN, Centers Aligned with Areas for National Need) nor the deans will help. The Medieval Academy of America is akin, if smaller, in some respects to the Modern Language Association; its (necessarily?) Eurocentric orientation poses challenges similar to those that, for example, the Society for Cinema and Media Studies poses for those of us who work in contemporary Russo-Soviet media: there is little place for us there. And, after the 2022 invasion, with an increasing number of us unable, ill-advised, or forbidden to return to the Russian Federation, how do we re-imagine our larger research field?
Big money will not build us a long-range, institution-level research plan to sustain the invaluable training and knowledge base of the pre-eighteenth-century Slavic scholar. Our vulnerability (am I right?) is that we currently also lack the imaginative capacity to both re-engage ourselves with common research questions and to systemically mentor our PhD students as they discover new relevance of cultures and histories before someone like Antiokh Kantemir (to choose one figure). If, after all, we can mentor PhD students in Soviet cinema with a secondary expertise in contemporary Kazakh documentary, could we not—through initiatives with a longer historical reach (in syllabi, summer workshops, guest speakers, and course modules)—rediscover the value of a longer durée that engages such work as that represented here in productive dialogue? Here there are no villains. But let us, for example, imagine integrating Vassian Patrikeev (subject of the article in SEEJ seventy years ago) back into our understanding of the world in its longer accounting of non-acquisitors.Footnote 21
Fernand Braudel pronounced (perhaps too optimistically) that “all the human sciences, history included, are contaminated by one another. They speak the same language or can do so” (my emphasis).Footnote 22 He imagined a shared universe, released from short-term, event-driven history, when we might still discern traces of “old habits of thought and action, of resistant frameworks dying hard, at times against all logic.”Footnote 23 Counter-arguments can only strengthen this opportunity, since perhaps the debates about these resistant frameworks (again, “against all logic”) can accompany us as we re-read the medieval texts we first discovered in graduate school.Footnote 24 I leave a blank space here for your comments, in hopes you will not regret the time spent reading the essays that follow.
Nancy Condee is Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Pittsburgh. She is a scholar of contemporary Russian culture, cinema, and cultural politics and a member of the Film and Media Studies Program. She is Director of the Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies (REEES) at the University of Pittsburgh.
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